Earlier quoted context omitted.
I feel like the more you learn about neuroscience, the more you learn how precise and complex neural information processing is. For instance, there's evidence that at least some neurons "record" information about their activity in the form of RNA. Also the placement of synapses in the dendritic arbour matters, and some synapses can act like logic gates with respect to the synapses farther down the same branches. I th…
> there's evidence that at least some neurons "record" information about their activity in the form of RNA Source? I'm not a neuroscientist, but I'd have thought that I'd have heard of this if there were legit evidence. Are you saying that neurons might use RNA as a sort of "long-term" memory of activation patterns? This seems really unlikely! But again, I'm not a neuroscientist.
Neurons unexpectedly encode information in the timing of their firing
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Re: Neurons unexpectedly encode information in the timing of their firing
#72I find a lot of the common explanations of how the brain works in neuroscience to be unsatisfying… compared to molecular biology, it just feels like often we don’t have a solid (falsifiable, etc) grasp of what’s actually happening, yet… too much handwaving (for instance, the lack of any specifics on where precisely some data is located… even “it’s stored in the connections” seems not quite true or falsifiable… althou…
I mean, we can't really completely inspect a working brain to see what's happening. To get that level of inspection, we'd need to dig into the brain while it is functioning. Unfortunately, this kills the patient. And then the brain stops working. It's a black box essentially. We have tools that allow us some degree of insight, but honestly, it is incredibly difficult and progress is slow and staggered.
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Re: Neurons unexpectedly encode information in the timing of their firing
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
I feel like the more you learn about neuroscience, the more you learn how precise and complex neural information processing is. For instance, there's evidence that at least some neurons "record" information about their activity in the form of RNA. Also the placement of synapses in the dendritic arbour matters, and some synapses can act like logic gates with respect to the synapses farther down the same branches. I th…
> there's evidence that at least some neurons "record" information about their activity in the form of RNA Source? I'm not a neuroscientist, but I'd have thought that I'd have heard of this if there were legit evidence. Are you saying that neurons might use RNA as a sort of "long-term" memory of activation patterns? This seems really unlikely! But again, I'm not a neuroscientist.
I'd have thought that I'd have heard of this if there were legit evidence
Changes to DNA would be the long term changes, not RNA. But yes, look up epigenetics, and especially DNA methylation.
Re: Neurons unexpectedly encode information in the timing of their firing
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hilarious. We shouldn't trust rat/mouse studies, but it's typically because the mice are way LESS complicated than humans. I would expect complicated behavior in mice to be treated as a lower bound for the complexity in humans. (but what do i know, i'm just a monkey.)
There are lots of animals that can beat us at specific neural tasks. So I don't think it's helpful to think in those terms. For example, our visual short term memory is bested by chimpanzees, at least on certain tasks used to measure it across both chimps and humans. Lowly mice likely have better olfactory capabilities than us. It wouldn't surprise me if their brains can handle some very specific things better than w…
maybe, humans have great olfactory sensitivity and can rival dogs with some smells, but our nose is to far from the ground to be useful for many tasks and in-turn leads to lack of use and we kind of ignore it and generally don't get how to use it
https://www.livescience.com/59070-human-sense-of-smell-sensi...
Re: Neurons unexpectedly encode information in the timing of their firing
#75I find a lot of the common explanations of how the brain works in neuroscience to be unsatisfying… compared to molecular biology, it just feels like often we don’t have a solid (falsifiable, etc) grasp of what’s actually happening, yet… too much handwaving (for instance, the lack of any specifics on where precisely some data is located… even “it’s stored in the connections” seems not quite true or falsifiable… althou…
I wish we had a large research effort on just trying to understand a cpu running windows 98. E.g. put all of our best analysis tools to task against an operating pentium chip and see if we can determine from first principals that it is running a W98 screen saver. That would give us a small sense of the challenge we are facing.
Well, you are not the first one
https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/jo...
Re: Neurons unexpectedly encode information in the timing of their firing
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's still extremely unlikely given all we know about quantum computers so far, and about biology. It's also important to note that quantum computers are just faster classical computers, they are still Turing machines. Many people who are looking for some non-computable element of consciousness in quantum effects in microtubules seem to forget that.
Quantum computers are not Turing machines as far a I know. They can encode exponentially many states simultaneously, and are non-deterministic.
they are they just dont work in binary bits they work with qbits which simply have behavior rules diffrent from digital but can be simulated by one just inefficiently. much like a binary computer can be approximated by a balanced trianay computer or analog computer or by pumps valves and flowing water like in MONIAC. they are all turring complete and can simulate each other just not efficiently. they dont have any magical logic gates they are just able to do a task that would need require lot of time or many parrelel computaions or both in less time because a single qbit is in super position of 1 and 0 simaltaniously and we can do mathmatical operations on it without collapsing the superposition until we have observed it. to simulate this on a traditional computer you would need to run it for each 2 time per bit.
so for a 8 bit key for example you would need to run the same operation 256 times 65536 for a 16 bit key and 4,294,967,296 for a 32 bit. so in essence quantum computation just lets you cheat on massively parallel processes but is not a hyper-turring machine or a turring oracle. in fact there are many algorithms that you get no gain from using qubit other than i higher energy bill
Re: Neurons unexpectedly encode information in the timing of their firing
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's still extremely unlikely given all we know about quantum computers so far, and about biology. It's also important to note that quantum computers are just faster classical computers, they are still Turing machines. Many people who are looking for some non-computable element of consciousness in quantum effects in microtubules seem to forget that.
Quantum computers are not Turing machines as far a I know. They can encode exponentially many states simultaneously, and are non-deterministic.
They are not computably non-deterministic, so they are still Turing machines with a random number generator attached.
Qubits aren't magic either and the amount of data they can store is well known, it's just a complex bit instead of a real one.
Re: Neurons unexpectedly encode information in the timing of their firing
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean, we can't really completely inspect a working brain to see what's happening. To get that level of inspection, we'd need to dig into the brain while it is functioning. Unfortunately, this kills the patient Leave out the completely and it's a different story though: it's perfectly possible to 'dig in while functioning' i.e. inspect small parts using electrode arrays and that will not kill the patient and only do…
That's kind of why I said completely. Our ability to know how a brain works on the level of how well we know, say, the combustion engine works is severely limited by the fact that we're dealing with living beings and that the state of consciousness of the subject matters.
yup to understand it we would have to take apart and experiment distructively on working one which woud be un ethical.
reminds me of a argument i had with my sister a psych major about whether psychology is a actually a science. her answer was it could be but it would break to many laws, violate human rights and ethics boards would frown at you for cloning hundreds of humans to raise in identical situations to do a/b testing on.
Re: Neurons unexpectedly encode information in the timing of their firing
#79I find a lot of the common explanations of how the brain works in neuroscience to be unsatisfying… compared to molecular biology, it just feels like often we don’t have a solid (falsifiable, etc) grasp of what’s actually happening, yet… too much handwaving (for instance, the lack of any specifics on where precisely some data is located… even “it’s stored in the connections” seems not quite true or falsifiable… althou…
There’s a strong bias toward things that are model-able in neuroscience. The role of microtubules, for example, are mostly ignored even though they may explain the complexity of cognition displayed by relatively “simple” brains.
Microtubules are found in all eukaryotic cells. Even single celled organisms. If microtubules are responsible for cognition, what are brains for, and why aren’t amoeba intelligent?
Re: Neurons unexpectedly encode information in the timing of their firing
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fringe Tangent: It's possible those microtubules in our brains are 1 dimensional superconductors, and thus might be capable of holding Qubits. We might have quantum memory. https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1812/1812.05602.pdf
That's still extremely unlikely given all we know about quantum computers so far, and about biology. It's also important to note that quantum computers are just faster classical computers, they are still Turing machines. Many people who are looking for some non-computable element of consciousness in quantum effects in microtubules seem to forget that.
quantum computers are not just faster classical computers. Quantum algorithms have no classical counterpart. In fact the literal clock speed per quantum computation may be slower but the computation will still get done faster overall.